We're all redistributionists, including Romney

An old video clip of then-Sen. Barack Obama saying he believes in “redistribution” is hardly the big news that Mitt Romney’s campaign claims. We’re all redistributionists nowadays, even Romney. (Mike Miner, Tribune illustration)

An old tape that shows Barack Obama saying he believes in "redistribution" is hardly the big scoop that Mitt Romney's presidential campaign claims. To some degree, we're all redistributionists now, even Romney.

Romney's campaign and conservative media have been touting the 1998 video clip of then-state Sen. Barack Obama at Chicago's Loyola University, in which he says "I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot."

That R-word is a fighting word to the far-right, especially the wing nuts who view Obama as a quasi-Marxist, secret Muslim and secret Kenyan who can't wait to hand your nest egg over to welfare cheats.

However, as more sensible conservatives point out, the "redistribution" sound bite is hardly hot news. We chewed over the redistributionist rap quite well after presidential candidate Obama told Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher four years ago that he wanted to "spread the wealth around."

Besides, in an uncut version of the Loyola tape unearthed by NBC, Obama goes on to argue for competition and free-market capitalism, coupled with a need to help the least fortunate. That's a thoroughly mainstream argument.

In fact, whether we Americans face up to it or not, we're all redistributionists now, including Romney.

Take, for example, Social Security and Medicare. They remain two of the government's most popular, fiercely protected programs, despite their long-term funding woes. Mend them, don't end them, voters say. Yet each program is redistributive in its own way.

So is our progressive tax structure with the way its complicated array of income brackets and exemptions is set up. Even flat-tax proponents tend to be redistributionists. They merely want to redistribute the taxing-and-spending burdens and benefits in a different way.

That's where Romney rolled off the rails, in my view, in his far more damaging, secretly videotaped remarks at a Boca Raton, Fla., fundraiser — a video clip from which his camp has tried in vain to divert attention with the Obama video.

Responding to a question about his campaign, Romney declared he was not going to worry about the "47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what" because they "pay no income tax," "so our message of low taxes doesn't connect." They were "dependent upon government," Romney said, and believe that they are "victims" and "are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

But the 47 percent who didn't pay federal income taxes in 2011 didn't pay because they did not owe any taxes. More than half of them did work and paid payroll taxes and state and local taxes, but did not earn enough to pay federal income taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The rest were mostly elderly. Fewer than one in 10 were classified as nonworking.

And the taxes they paid amounted to a higher percentage of their income than they did for upper-income earners, the center reports.

Although Romney allowed in a Fox News interview that he could have been more "elegant" with his remarks, he didn't back away from them. Rather, he said he believed we should have enough well-paying jobs so that "people have the privilege of higher incomes" that would enable them to pay taxes.

"I think people would like to be paying taxes," Romney said in what may be the nicest thing that a major Republican candidate has said about taxes since the era before Ronald Reagan.

In fact, Romney used to like redistributive programs when he was the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts. However, it appears he has since put that former self into a blind trust held by the tea party.

That's politics. The political issue is not whether government redistributes but who pays and who benefits.

Besides, Romney should know better than to conflate the nonpaying 47 percent with committed Obama voters. Only about two-thirds of people in families earning less than $30,000 voted for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls. The rest voted for Obama's Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain. If Romney really wants to give those low-income voters away, I'm sure Obama would be delighted to take them.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage.